Yahoo yanks Saturday Night Live from Hulu

1975-2013 episodes will be available exclusively on Yahoo for at least a year.

Saturday Night Live, a long-time staple feature of Hulu service, will be relocating to Yahoo, the company announced via press release last night.

"Hello, all of American women! Do you make the Yahoo?"

NBC Universal/Broadway Video

Yahoo cut the deal not with SNL's network, NBC, but with Broadway Video, the distributor owned by SNL show runner Lorne Michaels. Yahoo's press release explains that Yahoo and Broadway will create a "digital hub" for SNL, and that "[a]rchived 'SNL' content will be removed from other video platforms and available exclusively on the digital hub for one year." This means that starting in September 2013, all the SNL content currently up on Hulu will vanish, migrating over to the new Yahoo hub. Hulu will still show current-season clips, but anything older than that will be available only on Yahoo.

Exclusive availability of older SNL clips isn't that new; as anyone who's tried to find an SNL skit or commercial parody knows, they're posted on YouTube and taken down with regularity. But the New York Timesnotes that Hulu is focusing on producing more of its own original content, and Broadway Video is trying its best to draw additional dollars out of its stable of television programming. The deal here between Broadway Video and Yahoo gives Yahoo an enormous amount of content, which Yahoo will promote across its entire network of sites; according to the Times, sources familiar with the deal speculated that Yahoo paid north of $10 million for the year of exclusivity, based on the cost of similar deals in the past.

Digging into the press release shows that although Yahoo will be the definitive home of SNL on the Web, it won't necessarily get everything. Yahoo says that it will be hosting the following:

"A library of show clips from the 1975/76-2012/13 seasons"

"Select 'SNL' musical performances"

"Making-of and behind-the-scenes clips"

"A selection of dress rehearsal clips"

"A library of show clips" and "select musical performances" definitely isn't the same as "all episodes," unfortunately. A complete list of musical acts is almost certainly too expensive to be a realistic possibility, since separate rights would have to be negotiated with each copyright holder for online performance or distribution (and who watches SNL for the music, anyway?), but the "library of show clips" is potentially troubling. Still, Hulu has a long list of SNL content (including my favorites, "Old Glory Insurance" and "The Phone Company"), so with luck Yahoo will at least be able to feature everything currently on Hulu.

Everyone in this picture is a Yahoo Lover.

NBC Universal/Broadway Video

One positive byproduct of the move to Yahoo is that the SNL clip archive will be available for viewing outside of North America. The ludicrously complex state of international distribution licenses have kept Hulu's SNL archive region-locked, but Broadway Video explicitly stated that the Yahoo deal will remove that restriction. This is a win for everyone: people outside of North America won't have to use VPNs to fake a North American IP address just to watch Digital Shorts, and Yahoo and Broadway Video can grab more eyeballs and advertising dollars.

Reading between the lines, it's easy to see that this is the start of Yahoo's attempt to revive its video distribution business. With Netflix and Google pushing hard into streaming original programming, Yahoo needs something to draw eyes (and advertising dollars) to its own streaming platform. A big and well-promoted property like Saturday Night Live fits the bill perfectly, though it's a means to an end rather than the end itself; the exclusive deal between Yahoo and Broadway Video is only for one year. Look to see Yahoo draw people in with SNL and attempt to keep them with more original content, just like its competitors.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.